Implementation of Schedules and Timelines

Hi everyone. Today I'm going to talk about how to implement schedules and timelines. I'm sure each of us has faced a number of problems with timelines. My name is Karol Kozer. I am senior software engineer and I am the creator of PlanBy and OpenSource project.

Let me say a few words about timelines. Timeline is a really simple tool that displays time, cyber and content. At the top, we have a timeline with time. On the left there is a sidebar listing the providers. In the middle, there is a layout with events positioned in a timeline. Basically, users have the possibility to view all future and past events for all given providers, both horizontally and vertically.

Let's take a look at what problems we have with timelines. Let's focus on how it looks from the user perspective. The user can see only the time, cyber and the content. Basically, the user can move around the layout, both horizontally and vertically to see future and past events. I would like to also mention that our user doesn't care about the technical implementation and solution in our app.

Let me cast some light on how it works under the hood. Without any optimization and performance solutions, we can have, let's say, 5,000 elements on the website. The most important thing in this type of feature is performance versus really big data on the website. Basically, keeping all the elements without any optimization and performance solutions on the page can lead to terrible slowdowns of the application, which eventually caused the browser to crash. Also the positioning of all programs in the layout seems simple, but sometimes could also be problematic.

Let's focus on the following question. Are they good and bad solutions? I would say that this is a really complex topic and it only depends on what would you like to achieve or what is the right solution for your project. Also, you have to keep in mind how to quickly interact with the user. You have to think about features like filters, reminders, modal and many, many more. Finally, I would like to introduce you to the plan by component. The definition of plan by is quite straightforward. Plan by is a React-based component that lets you implement your own timeline so fast and simple. That's the whole definition, nothing crazy. Plan by is developed with React and TypeScript with minimal amount of resources.

Plan by uses a custom virtualized view, or you can call it timeline virtualized, which allows you to operate on a really big amount of data and position all the elements in your schedule out of the box. And this is really, really cool.

Next, I would like to focus on how plan by works. Basically, Plan by only renders the elements which are visible to the user and performs all calculations in the background. When the users scrolls down or to the right, Plan by is refreshing the view with only visible elements to the user. All the elements outside of the layout are not included in the HTML structure, making the Plan by component much faster and more efficient.

Plan by has a simple interface and includes all the necessary features like sidebar, timeline, layout, and live program refreshing. In addition, there is an optional feature allowing to hide any element you don't want to include in the layout. Basically, component has a really simple API that allows you to implement your own items along with your preferences. You can use plan by styles components to develop main features, you know, or make custom styles in line with the chosen design.

Let's take a look what we can build with plan by. Using plan by you can build wherever you want, schedulers, conference, music events, TV guides, calendar planners, and many, many more ideas. The installation of the component is really easy. You just need to install the package using yarn or npm. The setup is very simple and minimalistic. The setup is very simple and minimalistic. I really like that. All you need to do is to import a few components, one hook and two wrappers. And that's it. Let's hold the setup. This is really, really simple, and you can create beautiful schedules like this one in a few minutes. Thank you very much for your time and see you at React Advanced London.